


No Wider Than the Heart is Wide

by minnabird



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio), Doctor Who (TV Movie 1996)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Developing Friendships, Gen, Healing, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-16
Updated: 2020-08-16
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:00:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25930222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minnabird/pseuds/minnabird
Summary: C’rizz opened his eyes to a sky so clear and bright it was nearly silver. He groaned and let his head thunk back against the gritty surface under him. “Can’t you just let me rest?” he asked the universe.The universe did not answer.
Relationships: C'rizz & Grace Holloway
Kudos: 3





	No Wider Than the Heart is Wide

C’rizz opened his eyes to a sky so clear and bright it was nearly silver. He groaned and let his head thunk back against the gritty surface under him. “Can’t you just let me rest?” he asked the universe.

The universe did not answer.

In fact, nothing answered. His head was as impossibly clear as the sky. “Hello?” he tried cautiously, squeezing his eyes shut to search the corners of his mind. No voices, only his own thoughts. C’rizz could not now remember a time when he had been truly alone in his head. He began to laugh, and once he started, he laughed till he had no breath, till it turned into gasping sobs.

Eventually he sat up, the heat of this place already drying the tears on his cheeks. “I must really be dead, then,” he said. An empty plain stretched to the horizon, white and sparkling. It wasn’t cold, so it must not be snow. C’rizz had liked snow. He lifted his fingers to his lips and sniffed, then tentatively tasted. “Salt,” he said in surprise. “Perhaps this is just what death looks like here.”

“No, it’s just what Utah looks like,” came a dry voice. 

C’rizz startled badly. He took a deep breath, concentrating on what information he had at hand. Charley’s and the Doctor’s voices had always sounded like home, but this woman’s accent was different. Flatter, somehow. Still, he could understand her, and something was niggling at him. Something familiar. He twisted to look. She looked human, or perhaps Time Lord, or something else that looked much the same. Bipedal; pale, pinkish skin; hair the color of a candle flame. 

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the woman said, and came forward to crouch beside him. “I didn’t mean to scare you.” She pulled a bottle from the bag she was carrying and offered it to him. “I was just coming to check on you; you looked like you might be sunsick or something.”

C’rizz tried the liquid in the bottle tentatively, then began to gulp it down when he realized it was water. “Thank you,” he said, gasping, as he held the bottle out to her. “Utah, you said? Is that a...planet?” 

The woman’s eyebrows climbed up her forehead. “You’re pretty far from home, aren’t you?” she said, looking him over meaningfully. “Don’t worry, you’re not the first alien I’ve met.” She spread her hands as if to indicate everything he could see. “Welcome to planet Earth.”

“ _Earth_ ,” C’rizz said. He scrambled to his feet; she stood as well, clearly ready to catch him, but his body held steady. 

“Been here before?” the woman asked, putting her hand on her elbow. C’rizz almost flinched again, then relaxed under the touch.

“I...yes. A few times.” C’rizz blinked, then turned to the woman. “Not to Utah, though. Is it far from England?”

The woman squeezed his elbow. “I’m afraid it is, lizard boy. Why don’t you come with me, though, and I’ll at least get you somewhere safe.”

“I’m not a lizard,” C’rizz grumbled.

“Well, you haven’t exactly given me a name.”

“You haven’t given me one, either. Shall I call you boremole girl?”

“Depends.” The woman tilted her head, clearly trying to hold her smile back. “What’s a boremole when it’s at home?”

“It’s a sort of...giant rodent, mostly hairless, very pink.” C’rizz abruptly remembered that he had no idea how to get to civilization, and perhaps he had better not antagonize the locals. If he really was alive, it was best to try to stay that way. “Er, they make very nice burrows? Good shelter.”

The woman stuck out her hand. “Grace,” she said.

C’rizz shook it. “C’rizz.”

What he had taken for empty wilderness turned out not to be so remote as he had first thought. “It’s a little bit of a walk,” Grace had said, but his body was stronger than either of them had really been expecting. His legs were barely beginning to tire when they reached a hard square of asphalt, shimmering in the heat and half-full with cars.

“This is me,” Grace said, unlocking a silvery-blue model, sleek and low-slung. “Go around the other side, it’s open.”

C’rizz climbed into the passenger seat. “You know, I don’t think I should be climbing into strange people’s vehicles,” he said. 

“You have someone else you can call for a ride?” Grace asked. She seemed genuinely curious.

And that was the rub, wasn’t it? He hadn’t got anyone to call; there was no way of knowing where the Doctor and Charley had got to. He certainly wasn’t where he had left them. “No, you’re right.” He settled back into the seat. “Where are you headed, then?”

“San Francisco, eventually.” Grace pulled a safety harness over her chest and buckled it somewhere to her side. C’rizz checked, and it only took him a moment to work out how to do his. “But it’s a pretty long drive, so I’m breaking it up over a couple of days. Tonight, Reno.” She glanced over. “You don’t know what any of those places are, do you?”

“Afraid not,” C’rizz said. 

“So you’ve been to Earth and heard of England, but you don’t know your American geography.” The car purred as Grace turned it on. “Obviously haven’t made an extensive study. Did you wind up here by accident?”

“You could say that, yes.” 

“You wanna elaborate?” 

Her eyes were on the road, not him, as she turned out of the parking lot. It gave him space to think through his answer. “I don’t think I will, if it’s all the same to you,” he said. “It’s a long story, and not really a pleasant one. But I come in peace.” He felt an ache settle in his chest; it was a line the Doctor had trotted out as a joke, with an inflection that told him there was a reference there, though he had never learned it.

“Take you to our leaders?” Grace said, affecting a strained, monotone voice.

It startled a smile out of him. “No,” he said. “That won’t be necessary.”

For a while, they managed in relative silence. He could tell Grace was curious, but she set it aside and turned on some music that played softly, bright melody lines sung over warm chords from some string instrument. The land speeding past the window changed from the flat, mirror-like salt pan to something sun-bleached and scrubby, mountains rolling in the distance.

“It’s a long way to go, isn’t it?” he said. “A few days, in something that goes this fast. That seems long, to me, by pre-spacefaring standards.”

“We’ve been to space. Well, not me specifically. Landed a couple guys on the moon. We’ve got people who stay up there on a space station to conduct experiments.”

“Fascinating. Have you left your star system yet?” he asked.

“Mm. No, I imagine that’s quite a ways off,” Grace said. She tapped her fingers thoughtfully on the steering wheel. “We’re not exactly zipping off to distant planets, but we’re not a bunch of yokels, either.”

“I didn’t mean to imply that you were,” C’rizz said.

“I mean, I expect you had some kind of spaceship that crashed, or… No, that wasn’t a crash site, was it? Matter transporter beam, or something, that brought you here.” Her eyes darted over to his face, landing burning on him for a moment before she turned to the road again.

“You’re curious,” C’rizz said. “I’ve got questions, too. Perhaps we could have an exchange.”

“What, you answer one question, I answer one, that sort of thing?”

He hadn’t thought to structure it that way, but it sounded right. Anticipation sparked, and he cleared his throat. “Well, that’d work. Answer whatever, even if it sounds odd?”

“Deal,” Grace said. “I’ll start. How did you get here?”

“I don’t know,” C’rizz said.

“What do you mean, you don’t know? You must have got here somehow.”

“I…” Memory clutched at C’rizz’s throat. Pain, and terrible sounds, as his body began to break down. Charley’s voice pleading with him. Despite it all, the first true peace he had felt since L’da. “I died. And then I woke up here, and you found me. That’s all I know.”

Grace’s eyebrows quirked, but she nodded seriously. She didn’t reach across to comfort him, or make a joke, and he was grateful for it. “All right,” she said after a moment. “Your turn.”

C’rizz considered his options. He set a few aside, then chose one that would help him situate himself better. “What year is it?” He was still watching Grace, and so he saw her fingers clutch too hard at the steering wheel, watched her mouth tighten for a split-second. 

“2005,” she said.

He had wanted to figure out where and when he was relative to what he knew, to begin to piece together a picture so he could navigate this strange world. Now, he felt the temptation to ask questions about Grace.

“Why? What year were you hoping it was?”

That brought C’rizz up short. “1930, I suppose,” he said. 1930 was Charley’s year. Even if he didn’t find his friends, it would bring him closer to Charley to see her home. He glanced over. The tension in Grace’s face wasn’t from holding back questions anymore; she appeared to be in emotional distress. Perhaps a subject change. “Why did you travel so far alone?”

“Oh.” C’rizz breathed easier as Grace’s eyes refocused and her face relaxed. “That one’s easy. I was visiting my family. Driving back alone is the part of the vacation when I get to relax.”

“You were looking forward to being alone,” C’rizz said. 

“Don’t worry about it. You’re not the company I was trying to escape. Family. You love ‘em, but they drive you crazy sometimes.”

She had no idea. Still, there were ways to make up for the imposition. “If you need to rest, I can drive for a time.”

“I might try you on it in an hour or so. Have you ever driven one of these?”

“No, but I can grasp the principle,” C’rizz said. “You might need to tell me what you did with your feet and that knob next to the wheel at the beginning.”

“You noticed that?” 

“I thought it might be useful to know.”

Grace laughed. “Fair enough. Whose turn is it? Mine, I think.” She sobered. “Where exactly are you from?”

“Exactly?” C’rizz said. “The Eutermes zone, on Bortresoye.”

“Maybe a little less specifically than that,” Grace said. “I’ve never heard of Bortresoye.”

“Well, you wouldn’t. It’s very far away. Very far away, indeed.” C’rizz crossed his arms over his stomach, wondering how much it was safe to tell. Surely, a human from Earth couldn’t do anything with the information, but he might well overwhelm her.

“I can handle it,” she said, her voice wheedling. “You don’t know what kind of weird stuff I’ve seen.”

“It’s not in your universe,” C’rizz said.

“Well, that’s something you don’t hear every day.”

C’rizz turned right around to look at her. His instincts were clamoring at him, though he couldn’t get the message straight. He settled on _potential threat_ , just in case. “You’re remarkably calm about meeting an alien from another universe, but when I implied I was a time traveler— Yes, right there, you flinched again! And you were awfully keen to get me into your car...”

Grace held up the closest hand in a pacifying gesture, the fingers of the other splayed, though she kept it on the wheel. “I’m not going to do anything to hurt you. It just reminded me of...well, someone who I miss very much.”

That brought C’rizz up short, and he breathed in sharply, his heart still racing. “You haven’t just met an alien; you’ve met a time traveler.”

“Yes. And I don’t want to talk about it.”

He could see that, now. Sorrow, not calculation, had closed her off. “All right. I won’t ask.”

Somewhere around where Utah became Nevada, Grace pulled onto the shoulder and switched seats with C’rizz. After a few pointers, C’rizz put the car into drive and lurched onto the highway. Grace clutched at the door handle, but she laughed. “Go easy on the gas!” she said.

By the time he worked out how to keep them going at a steady clip, Grace had rolled down the window and leaned into the sun and wind, all loose-limbed enjoyment. 

Over the roar of the wind, he shouted, “Why do your laws restrict the speed to one limit when drivers are really expected to follow another, larger limit?”

“Have you ever seen a lawn with a ‘keep off the grass’ sign?” 

“Ah, so it’s optimism, then.”

C’rizz got them all the way into Reno. He had to reach over to shake Grace awake and ask her where to go. They parked in front of a hotel on the outskirts, and Grace disappeared inside. C’rizz stood beside the car for long minutes, looking up into a deep blue sky that looked ready to swallow him. 

What now? What now?

“C’rizz!”

He blinked and turned to look at Grace, standing framed in the automatic door. Light blazed around her, a rectangle of bright yellow against the deepening night. She raised her hand, holding a plastic card out towards him. “Don’t you want your key?” she said.

**Author's Note:**

> I relistened to Absolution recently, and it just made me want something where C'rizz gets to just...be, and to heal, and be happy. Somehow, my 'the TARDIS takes pity on C'rizz and he magically lives' concept turned into meeting another companion of Eight, and here we are. I make no promises on an update schedule or even where this is going; I'm mostly writing it as comfort fic for me.


End file.
